A Cup of Tea. Or Two.
Rating: Pg-13 for mild swearing and ass grabbing.
Summary: Arthur needs a place to stay so he finds Eames.
Warning: This was written in the wee hours of the night while I was working on a midterm...so it's unbeta'd. Also, it's rather filled with fluff and stuff, so be forewarned.
Author's note: Inspired by innueneko 's "more suspenders" fan art, which fills me with glee whenever I see it.
“Eames.”
The man in question looks up from his tea and his book, startled. He is in his flat and he’s supposed to be alone. The voice had come from behind so he turns. Arthur is standing just inside the closed door, looking at him. Eames blinks. Then blinks again. Then he sets the book on the table and rubs his eyes, thinking that maybe he’s hallucinating. The tea…
“Eames,” Arthur says again, slightly more insistently. Eames finds that he’s standing. The tea is set on its coaster on the coffee table, but he doesn’t remember putting it down, doesn’t remember standing up. He stares, bewildered, at the swirls of steam that rise from the cup into the cold air like question marks.
“Eames.” Oh. Right. He manages to smile in acknowledgement at the man (hallucination?) in his apartment as he covertly slips a hand into his pocket, checking for his totem. It’s there and it feels right. The grooves he notched into it still feel familiar to his fingertips. So he’s not dreaming and he doesn’t remember how he got to be standing right in front of Arthur because that’s just the effect that Arthur has on him. That’s even worse.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. It’s the first thing that comes out of his mouth but he really means, Oh, hello darling. I’ve been missing you.
Arthur smiles wryly at him and rakes a hand through his messy hair, brushing back unruly black locks that swing in his eyes. Eames has to actively think about keeping his jaw from dropping open from the shock. This would be a lot easier to believe if his totem felt wrong and he knew he was dreaming.
“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this. I just-the door was unlocked and-Jesus, Eames, you really should lock your fucking door. Anyone could just come in here and,” Arthur stops speaking abruptly, coloring a brilliant shade of red. Eames steps closer to Arthur and reaches around him to turn the lock. It clicks loudly against the quiet.
“Arthur,” he says, “not that I’m not pleased to see you and all but what are you doing here?”
“I need a place to stay for a few weeks,” Arthur says, the corners of his mouth turning down. “To lie low. It’s a long story. Incompetent shitheads. Godamnit.” Arthur, Eames has noticed, tends to talk in stressed bursts of sentence fragments when he’s angry.
“And you thought to come here?”
“I can’t get Cobb involved, not with Philippa and James. Ariadne’s in Paris and I can’t her involved. Yusuf’s in Mombasa again and I hate the heat. Saito’s busy in Tokyo.”
“I’m flattered that you thought of everyone before me,” Eames tells him, trying to use a light tone of voice to disguise the way a gaping hole seems to tear open in the pit of his stomach.
“No,” Arthur frowns deeper. “No, that’s not what I-shit, Eames, do you always have to put words in my mouth?”
“Well, last I remember, I put much more than that in there.” He’s trying to steer clear of the fucking elephant between them, keeping them separated worlds apart even though he’s standing so close he can smell the soap Arthur uses.
“Eames.” This time, Arthur says his name wearily. This time, Arthur says it with pain in his voice and a slump to his shoulders. Eames stops talking and watches.
He watches the way emotions fight across Arthur’s face-first frustration then anger then anxiety and…fear? Eames can’t, for the life of him, think of a reason why Arthur, a man who can stare down the barrel of a gun without so much as flinching, should be so fearful.
“Eames, I came here,” Arthur stops because his voice begins to break. He clears his throat and squares his shoulders, lifts his chin so he can look Eames in the eye. “I came here because I wanted to see you.” Eames nods thoughtfully. He really can’t think of a way to respond so he just smiles easily, falls into the easy role of a host.
“Well, darling, let’s get you set up, shall we? The guest bedroom’s unfurnished but I’ll nip out and see what I can do about getting you a bed.” He leads Arthur to the closed door and throws it open with a flourish.
It’s unfurnished but it’s not empty. It’s full with the paintings he’d started and the ones he’d finished and left to dry. Some are forgeries-damn good ones too-but a lot of them are his personal works, the paintings he does when he’s angry or happy or sad. The paintings he does when he can’t sleep at night.
Arthur just walks around the room and looks. He looks quietly and intently at each painting. He looks uncritically, just looks. Eames finds this unnerving, watching Arthur look at his paintings, at the tableaus he creates. They represent a part of his subconscious that he never really shares with anybody. It’s as if he’s somehow opened a new part of himself up to Arthur.
“I’ll get all this cleared out straight away,” Eames says, when he can’t take it anymore. Arthur turns to look at him and there’s an expression on Arthur’s face that takes Eames aback. It’s fierce and blazing and utterly inscrutable, and Eames can’t look at it too long because it’s like looking at the sun-god, what a cliché.
“Not all of them.” When Eames opens his mouth in surprise, Arthur adds, “please,” in a quietly earnest sort of way, obviously taking Eames’ shock the wrong way.
“Are you hungry?” Eames asks because his brain has, once again, failed to supply him with something to say and he changes the subject. Arthur shakes his head while, at the same time, his stomach growls and he turns slightly pink.
“A little,” he allows. Arthur follows Eames into the kitchen, sits at the counter on a barstool as Eames chops and sautés and simmers. He offers to help but Eames refuses with a smile because, if memory suits him correctly, Arthur is absolute shit in the kitchen.
He’s got a steaming plate of pasta in front of his guest within twenty minutes and a plate of his own. He pours wine for the both of them, and they eat. Eames tries not to be gratified by the way Arthur tucks into his food like he hasn’t eaten in years, tries not to grin too widely at the noises that Arthur makes, the way Arthur closes his eyes in apparent ecstasy.
They buy a bed for Arthur-“You don’t have to buy me a bed, Eames,” Arthur tells him. “Well, darling, I’m going to take that as you wanting to share mine?” had been Eames’ reply and Arthur had turned red and muttered something under his breath-and build it together. They make a mess of the living room, pushing aside all his furniture so they can spread out over the center of the room.
There are quite a few nearly crushed toes and much cursing that goes into the entire process. Eames thinks that maybe it would have gone quicker if he had been left to his own devices but Arthur had insisted with a steely glint in his eye. It was the one that told Eames he’d receive a bullet between the eyes if he so much as refused.
Arthur is fastidious about reading the instructions but Eames prefers a much more organic process. They spend as much time arguing about what they are doing than they do actually doing it. By the time the bed frame has been made, Arthur’s shed his jacket, his waistcoat, and his shirt; Eames is delighted to see that Arthur’s wearing suspenders, of all things. Eames is in a similar state of undress as well, but his suspenders-which he wears more by habit than anything else-are hanging from his pants. They each drink a beer and pretend to admire their handiwork in silence but what Eames is really thinking is how in the name of Jesus’ beard are they going to get the bed into the room and how he should have cleared the room before making the bed.
“I think I should probably remove some of those paintings now,” he tells Arthur, who stands quickly.
“I’ll help.” They walk into the room quietly, their shoulders bumping. Eames removes the unfinished Van Gogh forgery he’s planning on selling to one of Saito’s business associates, relocates the just-started Renoir that’s been causing him grief, and takes away the almost-completed Monet. Arthur handles Eames’ original paintings with great care, spreading them around the living room. There’s one he overlooks, walking past where it sits against the wall. Eames picks it up to toss it carelessly into the other room but Arthur stops him.
“Can I keep that one?” he asks. Eames is flabbergasted. He stares at the painting, then at Arthur, who is resolutely looking anywhere but at his face, and back at the painting.
It is, perhaps, the most colorful and abstract, and Eames knows it’s something he did when he was half-delirious with exhaustion but riding high on adrenalin. It’s this particular painting that is, perhaps, the most reflective of his subconscious because he’d been unable to fall asleep but had been simultaneously too exhausted for anything that required much brain power. That night, he’d set himself up with an array of paints and brushes and a freshly made canvas. He’d let his brushes meander across the canvas while he thought and thought and thought about a great variety of subjects. Mostly, though, he’d thought about Arthur.
“Huh.”
“What?” Arthur asks, taking the painting from Eames’ slackened fingers, a smile barely there on his face.
“Why?”
“It’s a good painting.”
“Arthur, why are you here?” Eames has asked this already, he realizes, but there’s something that remains unanswered, and he has to know. Arthur sighs and sets the painting gently-lovingly-against the wall before he turns to Eames.
“I wanted to see you,” he answers, unable to meet Eames’ questioning gaze. “I don’t know. I just-I wanted to see you.”
“So the incompetent shitheads…?”
“No, they’re real. The threat is real but…” Arthur’s voice trails off. He bites his lip, unsure.
“But?” he prompts. Instead of replying, Arthur hooks his fingers around the belt loops of Eames’ trousers, pulling him closer so their chests touch. Arthur’s fingers tug at Eames’ wife-beater and pull it up as they trace the lines of Eames’ muscles.
“But I still wanted to see you,” Arthur says finally. Eames inhales sharply and his arms wrap around Arthur’s waist, his hands locked at the small of Arthur’s back. “I was on the run and all I could think of was that I wanted to see you.”
They’ve fucked before. In Cairo, in Copenhagen, in Amsterdam. Eames has seen Arthur naked, has seen the way he tilts his head back when he’s about to come, has fucked Arthur and been fucked by Arthur. He’s seen Arthur shoot six men at point-blank, has seen Arthur vomit after drinking too much, has seen Arthur in pain. He’s never seen Arthur so vulnerable. He hears the words “I wanted to see you,” and he knows, with that part of his soul that has nothing to do with logic, that Arthur means “I love you.”
“Oh, darling.” He smiles and touches his forehead to Arthur’s, allows his hands to drift to Arthur’s ass. “Darling.” He doesn’t say “I love you,” but he means it.
“I like that painting because,” Arthur pauses, tracing Eames’ tattoos with his finger, “it reminds me of you. It looks like you. Loud and obnoxious and utterly chaotic and illogical.”
“But you love me anyway,” Eames jokes.
“Yes.”
“Come again?” Eames is flabbergasted again and he has half a mind to check his totem yet again. He would, too, if he were willing to let go of Arthur’s arse.
“But I love you anyway,” Arthur repeats slowly, as if he’s talking to an idiot. Something bursts in Eames’ chest and he’s smiling so widely he must look like a fool. He leans down and presses a kiss to Arthur’s lips, which part to invite his tongue inside. They kiss and kiss and kiss, and Eames puts his hands under Arthur’s arse-that beautiful, delicious arse-and lifts. Arthur’s arms wrap around Eames’ neck as his legs wrap around Eames’ waist and they kiss.
“Now, why don’t we break in that new bed of yours?” Eames murmurs. Arthur hums in agreement.
Later:
“Huh,” Arthur says, looking around him as the rush of his orgasm fades. Eames follows his gaze and smirks. They’re surrounded by a wreckage of splintered wood and nails, and the mattress is sloping-and the low price Eames had paid for the bed suddenly makes sense. There will be hell to pay from his neighbors but Eames can’t bring himself to care because he’s just had the best shag of his entire life.
“Huh, indeed,” he echoes, nuzzling Arthur, who leans into it. “Darling, I said we’d break in the bed, not actually break it.”
“Oh well,” Arthur shrugs casually, “I wouldn’t have used it anyway.”
The bed becomes firewood-“Most expensive firewood I’ve ever bought,” Eames grumbles good-naturedly-and the guest room becomes a library. And on wintry days, Eames has to make two cups of tea instead of one because Arthur stays.
Summary: Arthur needs a place to stay so he finds Eames.
Warning: This was written in the wee hours of the night while I was working on a midterm...so it's unbeta'd. Also, it's rather filled with fluff and stuff, so be forewarned.
Author's note: Inspired by innueneko 's "more suspenders" fan art, which fills me with glee whenever I see it.
“Eames.”
The man in question looks up from his tea and his book, startled. He is in his flat and he’s supposed to be alone. The voice had come from behind so he turns. Arthur is standing just inside the closed door, looking at him. Eames blinks. Then blinks again. Then he sets the book on the table and rubs his eyes, thinking that maybe he’s hallucinating. The tea…
“Eames,” Arthur says again, slightly more insistently. Eames finds that he’s standing. The tea is set on its coaster on the coffee table, but he doesn’t remember putting it down, doesn’t remember standing up. He stares, bewildered, at the swirls of steam that rise from the cup into the cold air like question marks.
“Eames.” Oh. Right. He manages to smile in acknowledgement at the man (hallucination?) in his apartment as he covertly slips a hand into his pocket, checking for his totem. It’s there and it feels right. The grooves he notched into it still feel familiar to his fingertips. So he’s not dreaming and he doesn’t remember how he got to be standing right in front of Arthur because that’s just the effect that Arthur has on him. That’s even worse.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. It’s the first thing that comes out of his mouth but he really means, Oh, hello darling. I’ve been missing you.
Arthur smiles wryly at him and rakes a hand through his messy hair, brushing back unruly black locks that swing in his eyes. Eames has to actively think about keeping his jaw from dropping open from the shock. This would be a lot easier to believe if his totem felt wrong and he knew he was dreaming.
“I’m sorry to barge in on you like this. I just-the door was unlocked and-Jesus, Eames, you really should lock your fucking door. Anyone could just come in here and,” Arthur stops speaking abruptly, coloring a brilliant shade of red. Eames steps closer to Arthur and reaches around him to turn the lock. It clicks loudly against the quiet.
“Arthur,” he says, “not that I’m not pleased to see you and all but what are you doing here?”
“I need a place to stay for a few weeks,” Arthur says, the corners of his mouth turning down. “To lie low. It’s a long story. Incompetent shitheads. Godamnit.” Arthur, Eames has noticed, tends to talk in stressed bursts of sentence fragments when he’s angry.
“And you thought to come here?”
“I can’t get Cobb involved, not with Philippa and James. Ariadne’s in Paris and I can’t her involved. Yusuf’s in Mombasa again and I hate the heat. Saito’s busy in Tokyo.”
“I’m flattered that you thought of everyone before me,” Eames tells him, trying to use a light tone of voice to disguise the way a gaping hole seems to tear open in the pit of his stomach.
“No,” Arthur frowns deeper. “No, that’s not what I-shit, Eames, do you always have to put words in my mouth?”
“Well, last I remember, I put much more than that in there.” He’s trying to steer clear of the fucking elephant between them, keeping them separated worlds apart even though he’s standing so close he can smell the soap Arthur uses.
“Eames.” This time, Arthur says his name wearily. This time, Arthur says it with pain in his voice and a slump to his shoulders. Eames stops talking and watches.
He watches the way emotions fight across Arthur’s face-first frustration then anger then anxiety and…fear? Eames can’t, for the life of him, think of a reason why Arthur, a man who can stare down the barrel of a gun without so much as flinching, should be so fearful.
“Eames, I came here,” Arthur stops because his voice begins to break. He clears his throat and squares his shoulders, lifts his chin so he can look Eames in the eye. “I came here because I wanted to see you.” Eames nods thoughtfully. He really can’t think of a way to respond so he just smiles easily, falls into the easy role of a host.
“Well, darling, let’s get you set up, shall we? The guest bedroom’s unfurnished but I’ll nip out and see what I can do about getting you a bed.” He leads Arthur to the closed door and throws it open with a flourish.
It’s unfurnished but it’s not empty. It’s full with the paintings he’d started and the ones he’d finished and left to dry. Some are forgeries-damn good ones too-but a lot of them are his personal works, the paintings he does when he’s angry or happy or sad. The paintings he does when he can’t sleep at night.
Arthur just walks around the room and looks. He looks quietly and intently at each painting. He looks uncritically, just looks. Eames finds this unnerving, watching Arthur look at his paintings, at the tableaus he creates. They represent a part of his subconscious that he never really shares with anybody. It’s as if he’s somehow opened a new part of himself up to Arthur.
“I’ll get all this cleared out straight away,” Eames says, when he can’t take it anymore. Arthur turns to look at him and there’s an expression on Arthur’s face that takes Eames aback. It’s fierce and blazing and utterly inscrutable, and Eames can’t look at it too long because it’s like looking at the sun-god, what a cliché.
“Not all of them.” When Eames opens his mouth in surprise, Arthur adds, “please,” in a quietly earnest sort of way, obviously taking Eames’ shock the wrong way.
“Are you hungry?” Eames asks because his brain has, once again, failed to supply him with something to say and he changes the subject. Arthur shakes his head while, at the same time, his stomach growls and he turns slightly pink.
“A little,” he allows. Arthur follows Eames into the kitchen, sits at the counter on a barstool as Eames chops and sautés and simmers. He offers to help but Eames refuses with a smile because, if memory suits him correctly, Arthur is absolute shit in the kitchen.
He’s got a steaming plate of pasta in front of his guest within twenty minutes and a plate of his own. He pours wine for the both of them, and they eat. Eames tries not to be gratified by the way Arthur tucks into his food like he hasn’t eaten in years, tries not to grin too widely at the noises that Arthur makes, the way Arthur closes his eyes in apparent ecstasy.
They buy a bed for Arthur-“You don’t have to buy me a bed, Eames,” Arthur tells him. “Well, darling, I’m going to take that as you wanting to share mine?” had been Eames’ reply and Arthur had turned red and muttered something under his breath-and build it together. They make a mess of the living room, pushing aside all his furniture so they can spread out over the center of the room.
There are quite a few nearly crushed toes and much cursing that goes into the entire process. Eames thinks that maybe it would have gone quicker if he had been left to his own devices but Arthur had insisted with a steely glint in his eye. It was the one that told Eames he’d receive a bullet between the eyes if he so much as refused.
Arthur is fastidious about reading the instructions but Eames prefers a much more organic process. They spend as much time arguing about what they are doing than they do actually doing it. By the time the bed frame has been made, Arthur’s shed his jacket, his waistcoat, and his shirt; Eames is delighted to see that Arthur’s wearing suspenders, of all things. Eames is in a similar state of undress as well, but his suspenders-which he wears more by habit than anything else-are hanging from his pants. They each drink a beer and pretend to admire their handiwork in silence but what Eames is really thinking is how in the name of Jesus’ beard are they going to get the bed into the room and how he should have cleared the room before making the bed.
“I think I should probably remove some of those paintings now,” he tells Arthur, who stands quickly.
“I’ll help.” They walk into the room quietly, their shoulders bumping. Eames removes the unfinished Van Gogh forgery he’s planning on selling to one of Saito’s business associates, relocates the just-started Renoir that’s been causing him grief, and takes away the almost-completed Monet. Arthur handles Eames’ original paintings with great care, spreading them around the living room. There’s one he overlooks, walking past where it sits against the wall. Eames picks it up to toss it carelessly into the other room but Arthur stops him.
“Can I keep that one?” he asks. Eames is flabbergasted. He stares at the painting, then at Arthur, who is resolutely looking anywhere but at his face, and back at the painting.
It is, perhaps, the most colorful and abstract, and Eames knows it’s something he did when he was half-delirious with exhaustion but riding high on adrenalin. It’s this particular painting that is, perhaps, the most reflective of his subconscious because he’d been unable to fall asleep but had been simultaneously too exhausted for anything that required much brain power. That night, he’d set himself up with an array of paints and brushes and a freshly made canvas. He’d let his brushes meander across the canvas while he thought and thought and thought about a great variety of subjects. Mostly, though, he’d thought about Arthur.
“Huh.”
“What?” Arthur asks, taking the painting from Eames’ slackened fingers, a smile barely there on his face.
“Why?”
“It’s a good painting.”
“Arthur, why are you here?” Eames has asked this already, he realizes, but there’s something that remains unanswered, and he has to know. Arthur sighs and sets the painting gently-lovingly-against the wall before he turns to Eames.
“I wanted to see you,” he answers, unable to meet Eames’ questioning gaze. “I don’t know. I just-I wanted to see you.”
“So the incompetent shitheads…?”
“No, they’re real. The threat is real but…” Arthur’s voice trails off. He bites his lip, unsure.
“But?” he prompts. Instead of replying, Arthur hooks his fingers around the belt loops of Eames’ trousers, pulling him closer so their chests touch. Arthur’s fingers tug at Eames’ wife-beater and pull it up as they trace the lines of Eames’ muscles.
“But I still wanted to see you,” Arthur says finally. Eames inhales sharply and his arms wrap around Arthur’s waist, his hands locked at the small of Arthur’s back. “I was on the run and all I could think of was that I wanted to see you.”
They’ve fucked before. In Cairo, in Copenhagen, in Amsterdam. Eames has seen Arthur naked, has seen the way he tilts his head back when he’s about to come, has fucked Arthur and been fucked by Arthur. He’s seen Arthur shoot six men at point-blank, has seen Arthur vomit after drinking too much, has seen Arthur in pain. He’s never seen Arthur so vulnerable. He hears the words “I wanted to see you,” and he knows, with that part of his soul that has nothing to do with logic, that Arthur means “I love you.”
“Oh, darling.” He smiles and touches his forehead to Arthur’s, allows his hands to drift to Arthur’s ass. “Darling.” He doesn’t say “I love you,” but he means it.
“I like that painting because,” Arthur pauses, tracing Eames’ tattoos with his finger, “it reminds me of you. It looks like you. Loud and obnoxious and utterly chaotic and illogical.”
“But you love me anyway,” Eames jokes.
“Yes.”
“Come again?” Eames is flabbergasted again and he has half a mind to check his totem yet again. He would, too, if he were willing to let go of Arthur’s arse.
“But I love you anyway,” Arthur repeats slowly, as if he’s talking to an idiot. Something bursts in Eames’ chest and he’s smiling so widely he must look like a fool. He leans down and presses a kiss to Arthur’s lips, which part to invite his tongue inside. They kiss and kiss and kiss, and Eames puts his hands under Arthur’s arse-that beautiful, delicious arse-and lifts. Arthur’s arms wrap around Eames’ neck as his legs wrap around Eames’ waist and they kiss.
“Now, why don’t we break in that new bed of yours?” Eames murmurs. Arthur hums in agreement.
Later:
“Huh,” Arthur says, looking around him as the rush of his orgasm fades. Eames follows his gaze and smirks. They’re surrounded by a wreckage of splintered wood and nails, and the mattress is sloping-and the low price Eames had paid for the bed suddenly makes sense. There will be hell to pay from his neighbors but Eames can’t bring himself to care because he’s just had the best shag of his entire life.
“Huh, indeed,” he echoes, nuzzling Arthur, who leans into it. “Darling, I said we’d break in the bed, not actually break it.”
“Oh well,” Arthur shrugs casually, “I wouldn’t have used it anyway.”
The bed becomes firewood-“Most expensive firewood I’ve ever bought,” Eames grumbles good-naturedly-and the guest room becomes a library. And on wintry days, Eames has to make two cups of tea instead of one because Arthur stays.